Child Smuggling Ring Uncovered

Published 1:18 pm, Monday, April 25, 2016

Federal police in Mexico said Wednesday that they had discovered a ring that was smuggling children from Central America to the United States.

Six Salvadoran infants were found in "deplorable conditions" at a house in Naucalpan, a Mexico City suburb, the Federal Preventative Police said.

Three people were arrested. Two other suspects were detained in Los Angeles, and authorities took six children found with them into protective custody there, Mexican authorities said.

Nicolas Suarez Valenzuela, the agency's coordinator of intelligence, said at a news conference that police discovered the ring when officers grew suspicious of two women accompanying six children, aged 9 to 11, at Tijuana International Airport near the U.S. border Monday.

The women turned the children over to someone else and immediately booked a flight to Mexico City, Suarez said.

Under questioning, he said, 27-year-old Estela Barajas Gonzalez admitted that her husband, Abel Bartolo Alanis, had received the children in Mexico City from a Guatemalan woman and that they were being sent with another person to Los Angeles. Barajas and her aunt, Virginia Barajas Perez, 43, were taken into custody.

Police who went to Bartolo's house in Naucalpan found six infants there and arrested him.

Suarez said records showed Barajas was arrested in 1998 and accused of child stealing, but the charges were dropped. He said the FBI and Salvadoran officials had helped in the case.

The infants found in Naucalpan were turned over to a child protection agency in Mexico City. Immigration officials in the United States had custody of the children captured in Los Angeles, Mexican police said.